Gilles DeLeuze

Question 1

The theorist

Answer 1

• Gilles DeLeuze
• French Philosopher
• Cinema 2: The time-image (1989)

Question 2

DeLeuze General

Answer 2

• DeLeuze adapts Henri Bergson’s concepts of movement and time
• He seeks to develop cinema as a thinking life-form
• It is a form of being rather than a mode of signification or meaning
• Film does not offer signs with meaning like in linguistic or semiotic theories.
• Cinema philosophises about movement and time with its own means
• Film is not made up of a pre-linguistic automaton: a brain
• DeLeuze’s direct representation of time allows spectators to step out of language and experience duration
• For DeLeuze, time is not an abstract unit of measurement, but an indivisible continuum that splits the present
• Filmmakers invent blocks of movement and duration moment

Question 3

What is the time-image?

Answer 3

• Found in modern Cinema
• Movement is subordinated to time
• Characters like people post-war, do not know how to react to situations
• The sensory-motor schema collapsed
• Time in the pure state rose to the surface of the screen
• Memory lies between perception and action
• Created through long takes (perceptible relationship of time) and irrational cuts linking different sheets of past (experience of duration)
• In time-image cinema links empty and disconnected spaces to recollection images
• The time-image is the system of relationships of time from which the variable present flows
• It reveals time in non-chronological order
• Flashback when used to reveal complex temporal structures, creates a direct time-image that goes beyond the empirical function of time (Coexistence of different sheets of past)

Question 4

Cinema of Resnais

Answer 4

• There is no fixed point
• Each sheet of past is capable of being a present (Present begins to float)
• Sheets of past coexist (Each sheet is a continuum)
• Cuts do not indicate continuity but variable distributions
• Descriptions of objects and places responds to a sheet of past
• He is interested in the mental function they correspond to on the level of thought
• He conceives cinema as the way the mind works
• Resnais attains a cinema with only one character: Thought!!!
• We can see the transformation from sheet to sheet as its own sheet, which extracts non-chronological time
• The past is not limited to be a recollection

Question 5

What is the movement-image?

Answer 5

• Found in classical Hollywood Cinema
• Offers an indirect representation of time
• Time is subordinated to movement
• Time is empirical and chronological through the succession of shots and continuity
• Sensory-motor schemata of the human body is a functioning unit
• Perception to feelings, feelings to sensation, sensation to action (Characters and spectators)
• Character’s react immediately

Question 6

How does the time-image reveal how cinema thinks?

Answer 6

• Past informs the present and the way you think
• Each sheet of past calls up mental functions (Recollection, forgetting…)
• This creates feelings for characters
• Feelings are in continuous exchange between sheets of past
• Feelings set free the thought from which they originate
• If feelings are in all sheets
• Thought is the non-chronological time which correspond to them
• The screen is the cerebral membrane where confrontations between past and the future take place